No Photshop here. Just a 15-second exposure and a flashlight.

News Flash

Hell of a Shell

The shell of the Venus Comb Murex. According to Wikipedia, it's a species of large, predatory sea snail. Not sure how this thing predates, but it sure is cool-looking.

Even cooler is the x-ray of it.

Did you know that that famous image of Cosette from the Les Miserables poster is actually taken from a much larger work?

It's one of the plates from the original edition of Les Mis (1862) and was created by Emile Bayard.


It's a wonderful engraving, of course, but the poor girl only looks to be about 18 inches tall!

They still use those kind of brooms in Paris, only now they're made of green plastic.

Hai!

Been real busy today, but I do have this for you:

Ernesto "Che" Guevara's first nickname: not Che, but "Fuser."

Fuser.

It's true.


Fuser.

The Mystery of Alum

We were buying spices the other night and noticed a bottle of a strange white powder called alum.

"What is this alum?" I thought.

It turns out that it's a chemical used in pickling cucumbers and fixing dye. It's also used in styptic pencils, and can also be used as a fire retardant, or underarm deodorant (or both, if you're worried about burning your axillae).

Also, it apparently has a sour/bitter, puckering taste that used to be used as a gag in movies and cartoons, such as in Back Alley Op-Roar where "Elmer feeds Sylvester Pussycat alum-laced milk, shrinking his head and driving his voice up several octaves while singing Figaro."

I think the obvious next step would be to get some alum, put it in my mouth, and see if my head shrinks.

Stay tuned!

Here's what the paper looks like

New Stationary

As if it weren't already cool enough to receive a letter from me, now you'll receive it in my newly-designed custom stationary! I can send it to all my friends.

Now I just need friends.

Send me your address and I'll send you a letter! It won't necessarily be a great letter, but I'll send something.

Niemann's latest

I thought this was one of the funnier illustrations I've seen in a while. From this week's New Yorker's Financial Page. The article, "The Trust Crunch," discusses the lack of trust between financial institutions following the meltdown, or crash, or fracas, or whatever we're calling it.

The guy on the far side of the court looks so confused, so sad!

The artist is Christoph Niemann, who always does awesome stuff.

It's rare that something on the Financial Page makes me laugh out loud.

Ringo Starr the grumpy barr

Tensions Mount between Ringo Starr, the World.

This article's hilarious.

"Former Beatle Ringo Starr will no longer sign memorabilia for fans and will throw away all fan mail he receives in the future, he has said."

Apparently he made a video (wearing all black) in which he stated the new policy, and posted it on his website. Could this have all begun in April when "a foliage sculpture of Starr outside a train station in Liverpool was beheaded by vandals"?

Apparently they were upset about an interview in which Starr said he missed nothing about the city.

I am dead

I seem to be dead.

But I don't feel dead. I guess you're only as dead as you act.

This Thomas Meaney (at right) was born in 1865 in Limerick, Ireland, and died in 1951 in Brooklyn, where this photo was taken. What a lifespan: to be born in the last year of the civil war, and live long enough to see UNIVAC, the first commercially available computer.

It's a bit weird to see one's name on a tombstone. My tombstone will look a little different, of course. The dates will be different, obviously. Also my wife will have to get her own damn tombstone. And mine will be made of porphyry. And there will be a golden statue of me atop it, wrestling a bear.

Its beauty will be a great consolation to my inheritances-less heirs.

If you'd like to find a tombstone with your name on it, just go here.

New toy

Yesterday's trip to Costco was a new record. We spent almost a week's wages.

"On what?" you may ask, with a little sneer of incredulity.

Well, among other things:

3 pounds of ground beef
4 giant pillows
1 fire extinguisher (responsible, no?)
1 lb mini cucumbers
2 rump roasts
1 lb of shrimp
2.5 lbs spinach
6 heads Romaine lettuce
A dozen chicken breasts
et cetera

and this:


The most bitchin' blender/food processor yet created by man. Hummus, applesauce, instantly-grated zucchini, homemade salsa, guacamole...it's all within our reach now. Stay tuned for the results.

U R hakt!

Zup peeplez! I iz Patrick, dee enemee! I'z hakt in2 dis syztem, 2 put up dee reel pixure uv me, dat sir Lame-0 (i.e. Thomas) not wants u 2 C.



Aiz kool! I'z rad. Tommy's a noob/dork/lame-o.

Never judge a movie by its working title

In 1977, I, personally, would have probably passed on a project called:

The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as Taken from the 'Journal of the Whills': Saga I - Star Wars

But that would have been a big mistake.

Fortunately, they ended up just using the last two words of the working title for the final title.

An insult! A crime!

I've been maligned. The arts themselves have been subverted and molested by a philistine whom, up until now, I had the naivete to trust:



My brother, my own flesh and blood, took the brilliant self portrait that I posted earlier and defaced it. What could motivate such a cold-hearted assassination of beauty I cannot even fathom. I reproduce it here as a warning.

Perpend! Oh, perpend my loyal readers: this is what happens when a normal adult brain gives in to the dark wraithes of the subconscious, when the delicate scales that keep man balanced beween the rational and the bestial are tipped horribly and irrevocably to the side of the savage:

Patrick's hat

Patrick has the coolest hat ever. Look: pretty cool, right?



Aaa, tres sophistique, mon Chappie.

But wait: it gets better. Press a secret button concealed in the brim, and the chapeau comes to life!



A hitherto-invisible illuminated skull appears within the hat. Spooky music plays, and an eerie Bela-Lugosi-style voice cackles and says "Don't be frightened."

Could there be a better hat?

No.

Self portrait with wax

Maybe he doesn't want to see. See things like this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7660409.stm

Ah, so dark and cool beneath the scarlet wax. Me no come out. Me stay here.

Lisa Crafts

I happened to stumble upon the work of animator and painter Lisa Crafts today, and I think she's great.



I don't really know anything about her, but I like her work a lot. The paintings have a rich, bright, warm quality that's really a cool juxtaposition with the fantastic, sometimes kind of eerie content



Also love this frame from her her animated short The Flooded Playground:



Anyways, check her out at http://www.lisacrafts.com.

Depth

So maybe you thought this was pretty deep:



Or maybe you thought this was really deep:



Or maybe you're one of those types who thought this was really deep:



Well you were wrong.

Those things are not deep. You know what is deep?

Voronya Cave: the deepest cave on Earth.

Check out this great photojournalism piece on National Geographic about a team that got down to 6,824 ft in 2004.

I guess getting to the bottom of the deepest cave in the world is not just a matter of lowering yourself down on a really long rope. The 56-person expedition took two weeks, and involved a number of points where they had to scuba through freezing water to get through "sump" sections.

The new Voronya record was set in 2007 at a depth of 7,185ft.

Universal Pictures = Jove

So I was listening to this fellow's version of the Black and White Rag, and it inspired me to read about silent Westerns, whereupon I came across this awesome ad:




How many companies these days are willing to assert that their product is superior to both writing and weapons?

Of course, they probably weren't thinking of this movie when they wrote that.

Kitty break!!!

Watch out kittehs!

Meaneys in Motion

My dad just sent me this picture he took of Patrick and me walking. I kind of like it. We weren't aware that we were being photographed. It's sort of rare to see a candid photo of oneself.

Do I sneer like that all the time?

Probably.

The Originality of Roy Lichtenstein

I've always liked Roy Lichtenstein, and part of what I thought was so cool about his work was that he was very clever about capturing the look and feel of comic book art...that his paintings totally could have been frames from 50's-era comic books.

However, what I recently found out is: they were frames from 50's-era comic books. He copied them. Line by line. Word for word.

And I'm not sure how to feel about it.

This fellow David Barsalou has somehow found all the originals and set up a great page where you can look at them side by side.

I mean, maybe everyone knew this except me. Maybe Lichtenstein was very open about it, and that was part of the statement or something.

I suppose there's nothing wrong with copying. My favorite play Hamlet was essentially a ripoff of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. [Spanish has the best alternate title ever: The Spanish Tragedie: or, Hieronimo is mad againe].

There is a painting that, I think, directly addresses the copying. Lichtenstein rarely altered the original version's text -- the sound effects, the speech and thought bubbles -- at all. But there's one painting where the speech bubble has been changed completely.

The original depicts a pair of nervous eyes and the text: "What? Why did you ask that? What do you know about the Stones of Babylon? Speak up!"

However, in Lichtenstein's version, we have the same worried eyes, but the text has been replaced with, "What? Why did you ask that? What do you know about my image duplicator?" which, if you ask me, can be nothing but the artist saying, "Yeah, I know they're copied...duh!"

Why am I so unpopular in Finland?

The numbers are in, and the Finnish situation looks grim. I can no longer deny the undeniable: Finns hate my blog.



Zero hits. None. Goose egg. L'oeuf*.

There hasn't been enough Finland-related content, apparently, but we're going to change that.

Did you know, for example, that the official bird of Finland is the Whooper swan? The whooper swan is white, has a yellow and black beak, and is HUGE! According to Wikipedia its wingspan ranges between 81 and 93 inches! That's what...6' 9" - 7' 9"!

And they can weigh up to 33 pounds! That's two bowling balls. How do they fly?

The two boaters in the picture give you some perspective:



Also, Finland has a population of 5.3 million, won their independence from Russia in 1918, and have a beautiful parliament building.

Oh, also, according to Wikipedia: "Becoming intoxicated has remained the central characteristic of Finnish drinking habits."

I wonder if getting full has remained the central characteristic of Finnish eating habits.



*(French for "the egg", which looks like a zero, which when said in English sounds like "love" which is why love in tennis means zero!).

Chowchilla snaps

I just came across these photos I took in Chowchilla, CA, a few months ago. It's a tiny little agrarian town out by Fresno. A lot of people know it as the location of the Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping (1976) which is a pretty amazing story (especially the part about the bus driver recalling the license plate number of the abductors under hypnosis).

They grow a lot of walnuts and a lot of soybeans (based on what I saw). Downtown there's a great bakery with a huge ceramic oven that the owner told me is at least a hundred years old. The baker gets up at 3:30 every morning to start cooking.

Once a year there's a big speedboat race at a nearby lake.

Chowchilla is also home to two maximum-security women's prisons, including the one that houses California's female death row. That's why we were there.

So while my dad visited his client at the Central California Women's Facility, I walked around town and took a few pictures.

That big green field: those are soybeans, I think.

My birthday cake

Here I am, by the way, with the amazing birthday cake that my neighbor Ashley and her friend Lauren made me. Amazing! No one besides my mother has EVER made me a birthday cake.

The Key Project

This is what I'm working on at Fox these days: organizing a sackful of keys into a cabinetful of (labeled) keys.

Yup, I spend a lot of time with keys. Keys keys keys. The other day I spent all day sorting keys, then when I left for the day got all the way to the elevator before realizing I'd forgotten my car keys! Man, we had a laugh about that one.

Ha! Ha. ha. ha.

Oh, boy.

Good song

Heard this on the radio this morning on the way to work, and thought it was great. Best listened to when driving on a beautiful sunny morning in LA with an ice-cold Red Bull/Halcion.

http://search.playlist.com/tracks/school%20of%20fish%20three%20strange%20days

My email program condescended to me

Yahoo thinks I am dumb.

I was reading an email from Patrick today, and I noticed the phrase "iced tea" was underlined in a dashed blue line. When I put the pointer over it, that "Y! Shortcuts" window popped up explaining what ice iced tea was with a picture of some.

????

Maybe I have the edition for four-year-olds.

A New Pelican Verb

I'd like to share a verb with you. Patrick made an important discovery as to the origin of the H in Jesus H. Christ, but I won't steal his beans, though, and spill the thunder.

However, his research prompted me to read about Christian symbolism, and the pelican.


1. The pelican is a bird.

2. In olden days the pelican was a symbol of sacrifice.

3. Because they thought it fed its young by piercing its own breast and feeding them its blood (eww)

This is referred to in a Shakespeare play, but I can't remember which one, and a Google search for "shakespeare pelican" yielded like a million hits for Pelican®-brand Shakespearean plays. Thanks for nothing, Pelican!

We'll say it was Romeo and Juliet. You remember that scene where Juliet's like:

The pelican's beak, the pelican's blood.
The six-legged monkey, fell down in the mud.
Violet's a tramp, and the roses are blue
Oh that my name, could be Montague too!

I think it's in the sixth act.

Anyways, ad rem nostrum, the verb.

The verb is VULN.

vuln

tr.v. vulned, vuln·ing, vulns To wound (oneself) by biting at the breast. Used of the pelican, which was once believed to feed its young with its blood, as a heraldic motif and symbol of Christ. [From Latin vulnerāre, to wound; see vulnerable.]

I think it could make a good adjective. A vulning confession? A vulning gesture?

I tried to learn more about this and googled "breast bite", but I got a LOT of pictures that were not work appropriate at all.

Meaney Library Cards, Hot off the Press

We have a good relationship with our new neighbors. We hang out, we help each other carry stuff, we lend each other things.

Patrick went to San Diego last week and brought back a bunch of our books, so the joke was that we have a library now, and we should issue the girls library cards so they can borrow books.

Under normal circumstances this would have remained a joke, possibly referred to again once, and then forgotten forever. However, given the magical confluence of

1. A computer

2. A Thomas Meaney, stuck in front of this computer for 8 hours

3. A laminator

jokes have a way of turning into reality.

And so, without further ado, I am proud to present to you the official Apartment 4, Meaney Brothers library card:

The background of the left-hand side is a page of the folio version of Hamlet. Artsy, no?

The Latin is "Liber scriptus proferatur," taken from the fifth stanza of the Dies Irae. It means "A book will be brought forth," which I thought was appropriate.

Henri Rousseau meets Street Fighter II

I'm not sure what to add next, but I found a painting yesterday that I thought was really funny, so I figured I'd put that up.

It's by one of my favorite artists, Henri Rousseau, and it's called Exotic Landscape, Fight between Gorilla and Indian (1910). Now, the junglescape is lovely, of course...but then at the bottom (as foreshadowed by the painting's title) we find a motif seldom invoked in French Post-Impressionism: a gorilla fighting an American Indian!


Never mind the sort of awkward postures. Never mind that they seem to be smaller than flowers. Never mind that gorillas and Indians come from two different continents. That's part of what I love about Rousseau: it's a pastiche of imagery, a sort of hodgepodge. And while the painting might not be factually accurate, it works very well visually. His jungle paintings are less like a National Geographic photo, and more like a dream you had about the jungle.


I was excited to find an homage to the painting, created by American artist Donald Simpson in 1990. I like to think of it as what Rousseau would have created if he'd had a stronger technical background:



After more research, I found a similar piece, also painted in 1910, that shows an uncanny prescience for video-game-robot/devil imagery on Rousseau's part. Housed at the Fresno Guggenheim, the exultant Exotic Landscape: Fight between Cyberdemon and Woman in Pink

So Karlo had a blog. And Jack too. And Patrick. So I got jealous and figured I'd start one too. Theirs are rather coherent and article-based. Maybe I'll move in that direction eventually. At this point, however, I don't feel a tremendous amount of pressure to make mine very "polished" since it will be read only by me (hi, Thomas!).

I feel like having a blog will:

1. Help to stave off boredom at work

2. Improve my typing

3. Siphon off some of the energy I currently put into my (hilarious) emails, so that my close friends and family won't be so overwhelmed by an inbox full of stuff from me

Well, here we go!